


in front of god and all the neighbors

by jonphaedrus



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Anime), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Age Difference, Ambiguously Canon Compliant, Canon - Anime, Character Study, Domestic Fluff, ElderShipping, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Gossip, Masara Town | Pallet Town (Pokemon), Morning Sickness, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pre-Canon, Shotgun Wedding, Single Parents, Slow Burn, Small Towns, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:15:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24148009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: There are other options than bad coffee and sad apples.Unfortunately, Delia Ketchum—Pallet Town's most beloved daughter—has to find a third option, and fast. The question of who is the father of her unexpected baby is going to cause more problems than she has solutions, and the last thing that she needs is for the rumor mill to reach her ex and for him to come looking for trouble.Fortunately, Professor Samuel Oak has an idea. Not agreatidea, but an idea. And since neither of them can come up with anything better...this might as well happen.
Relationships: Hanako | Delia Ketchum/Ookido Yukinari-hakase | Professor Samuel Oak, Past Hanako | Delia Ketchum/Sakaki | Giovanni, Past Kikuko | Agatha/Ookido Yukinari-hakase | Professor Samuel Oak
Comments: 30
Kudos: 45





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> welcome to this wild, aggressively heterosexual ride, in which i know approximately where we're going but have no idea how long it's gonna take to get there. we're going. god, but we're going.

Sitting curled up in the bathroom of The Pallet House restaurant, knees pressed to her chest and her forehead pressed into the peeling contact paper on the wall, Delia Ketchum pondered—not for the first time—how problems seemed to find her. Maybe it was something about being from such a small town: if you didn’t make a mess, someone else would make their mess _your_ mess.

Delia stared blankly at her hand. At the _pregnancy_ test in her hand. The _positive_ pregnancy test in her hand.

“Son of a bitch,” she said, to nobody in particular.

When it came to auspicious beginnings, Pallet Town hardly merited. The smallest community in Kanto, were it not for its very own hometown hero, it would be easy enough to overlook it on most maps.

  * Population: 3,100

  * Public libraries: 1

  * Movie rental stores: 1

  * Gas stations: 2

  * Schools: 3

  * Post office: 1

  * DMV: 1 (run out of the post office)

  * Banks: 2

  * Convenience stores: 8 (for some reason)

  * Pokémon Professors: 1

  * Restaurants: 1




It had been the latter that had finally tipped the scales that called Delia home. The Pallet House had been the only restaurant in Pallet Town for nearly forty years, and every time anyone tried to open a new restaurant, it would fold as soon as all the locals threw up a fuss. When Delia’s mother had died, Delia had faced certain expectations to take over and run it again, the third generation of Ketchum women who rolled their sleeves up and got to work in the kitchen. That was the way of Pallet Town: family businesses (and family _business_ ) stayed in the family.

If there was a problem, you shut the door, put down the blinds, and _dealt_. And Delia—hadn’t been able to. Every time she went inside The Pallet House all she could see was the impression of where her mother should have been sitting at one of the tacky neon diner booths, her handprints smoothing the peeling contact paper on the walls flat, or her brassy voice ringing out orders from the half-enclosed kitchen. There was no escaping from it, no pretending that she could fill the space half so well.

If she had been smart, she would have confided in someone. There was no shortage of willing ears, because Pallet Town was nothing if not a hotbed of secrets. Secrets that, of course, everyone knew. Anything you told anyone would make its way through the grapevine eventually. Grandmothers got the gossip, they passed it amongst themselves, and slowly but surely it would make its way down to the paper routes and the grocery runs and the tank fill-ups at the gas station.

Instead, she’d done what she had thought was the smart thing: left without telling anybody where she was going. Nobody could follow her, after all—nobody could chase her down and beg her to come home and offer an all-too-willing ear.

When she had come home from Viridian City at the start of the summer, Delia had promised herself that if she needed help, she would ask for it, but she was keeping her secrets to herself. _Help_ wasn’t gossip, but _secrets_ were. It wasn’t as if Pallet Town had any shortage of things to talk about, after all—that was the nature of small towns. People could always find something to gossip about.

After Viridian City, Delia Ketchum wasn’t letting _anybody_ make _anything_ out of her without her having said so.

She gave up and made coffee. It was something to do that didn’t require her to think. Even still, half paying attention, it came out of the espresso machine bitter and burned—a perfect example of when coffee ceased being coffee and became sad bean water. When she had sat down with it at the counter, the mug had sloshed and overflowed, adding another coffee ring to the hundreds that littered the plastic countertop.

She had closed down hours ago. The colorful striped curtains pulled over the windows made the shadows cast by the yellow streetlamps turn hazy, leaving everything washed-out and monochromatic. Delia felt like she was on the set of a bad tv show: the contrite teenage mother, resolved to live a life without sin only to be punished for her hubris, recounting to herself how she’d gotten here.

The test sat next to her on the counter on top of a paper napkin. It was too dim to see the + sign, but it was there anyway. She didn’t need to see it to _feel_ it, a presence haunting her in the ache in her lower back and her two months of missed periods and intermittent nausea.

She passed a hand over her face. “Okay,” Delia said aloud. She wished she had a Pokémon she could talk to, who would soothe her with their presence and take some of the weight off of her shoulders. She pushed the coffee mug away and set it down on her left, grabbed an apple from the nearby fruitbasket and set it at her right.

Delia slid down off of the stool so she was at eye-level with the counter, and stared her two options down. She crossed her arms on the counter. “Option one:” Bad coffee, black and oversteeped and bitter, a failed espresso shot pulled too-late that she shouldn’t drink, because it was already eleven and she did, actually, have to open in the morning for the breakfast crowd. Delia turned to her sad apple “Option two:” One of those apples that had started to go a little wrinkly and soft and was probably tasteless and watery inside.

“If it’s Giovanni,” she pointed at the coffee, “I turn the lie into the mystery. It’s a feature, not a bug.” She could maybe work with that, although the stress it would cause would be inescapable—creating a daily mystery was no easy prospect. “Unless he finds out.” Then she was up a creek without a water Pokémon and would have to hope blackmail would cover her bases.

She turned to the apple. “If it’s Spencer...”

Delia made a face. “Best option is to tell him and see what he wants to do.” Spencer would have an opinion, certainly. If it was his child, he was certain to want to be involved in that child’s life. He wouldn’t be a terrible father, either. But at the same time...

There was more than one way to start over.

Delia emptied the coffee down the kitchen sink, washed out the cup, and took one bite of the apple before giving it up as a tasteless, sad loss, and tossed it into the compost bin out back.

“There are other options,” she told herself as she locked up, “than bad coffee and sad apples.”

From The Pallet House, there were only really two options: go north and home, or go west, to the Lab at the top of the hill, its ever-turning windmill a bright streak of lights against the night sky. Rather than go straight home, Delia turned west at the intersection of the road, a slice of leftover quiche tucked under her arm in a paper bag.

Professor Samuel Oak’s Pokémon Laboratory was world-famous in the way that only hometown heroes ever seemed to be—they made a lot of stir everywhere else, but at home, they still tracked manure into the pharmacy like every other farmer too lost in his head to remember that he’d come straight from the field. And, like all hometown heroes, people usually never came all the way out to Pallet Town to visit him, because it was just too out of the way. His Lab might be the most recognizable location in Pallet Town, but that didn’t mean that it was somewhere people stopped by frequently. In the two months Delia had been home, she had often not seen a single other person climb the hill to go visit.

Still, when she’d first come home and he’d ridden his bike down to her front door to offer her a summer internship, it had been hard for Delia to not be awed by him. Her memories were still of Jason’s Dad: a paunchy, short farmer with greying brown hair that seemed completely unable to lay flat, perpetually half-unshaven and sleep-deprived, frazzled and easily distracted.

Then, after she had grown used to the way people outside of Pallet talked about him, Delia came back to find Professor Samuel Oak, who wasn’t the same man who she had once viewed in the lens of childhood. His hair had gone almost entirely grey in two years, lending him a far more majestic air. He’d traded his academic’s paunch into a stocky farmer’s build, and he had a unique way of combining muddy work jeans, a suspiciously-stained polo, and steel-toed boots with a labcoat and a university vocabulary that somehow made him even more impressive in comparison to the rest of Pallet Town’s residents.

The awe had lasted for all of two weeks. Then he’d just turned into another neighbor—Pallet Town’s own eccentric mad professor, who lived up the road, clattered into The Pallet House every morning for coffee, getting into arguments over the price of diesel just like every other farmer. You could put a Dodrio in a suit and tie, but it was still a Dodrio. And Professor Oak _never_ wore a suit, let alone a tie.

Tonight, Delia climbed up the porch to the sounds of the television and the radio blaring simultaneously from two different open windows. It was a nice, late-summer night; for once it wasn’t humid, and the wind off of the ocean blew straight up the hill, bringing with it the scent of salt and a cool breeze. A cluster of Venonats were all crowded around the porch light and they scattered at her approach, her footsteps scaring them off.

When Delia knocked on the door, Professor Oak opened it a moment later, a pencil stuck behind his ear and a sheaf of paper still in his hand. He was wearing an old t-shirt from Celadon University (emblazoned with the cult mascot Try-Hard Gloom, who was trying hard to smoke its own weed) and his work jeans. For once, the shirt was ridiculous enough to counteract the hair, and he looked like a man in his mid-thirties.

“Oh!” He broke into a grin. “Delia!”

“I brought you quiche,” she held up the bag. “Did you forget dinner again?”

Professor Oak turned away, wandering off down the hallway, calling over his shoulder. “Oh, probably—come in, come in. Can I get you something to drink?” Delia stepped in behind him, slipping her shoes off next to his work boots at the door to follow him into the kitchen. “I’m fine,” she replied—too late, because he was already filling a cup from the tap for her and pulling out a plate. When she passed over the paper bag, he plopped down the quiche and put it into the microwave to reheat.

Because she didn’t know what else to do, Delia sat down at the place he had set her. She was still jittery and on-edge, so in his own way, the sheer _normalcy_ of Professor Oak was reassuring. Here he was, a scatterbrained mess as always. As he rooted around in the fridge, Delia could see past his shoulder to the top shelf, which was covered by half-full takeaway Pallet House coffee cups, cardboard sleeves still attached.

Oak was rambling. “You didn’t have to come all the way out here just to bring me that,” he was saying, muffled from having his head in the fridge. “Not that I don’t appreciate it! But you ought to get home, I’m sure, rather than giving me some human company.” Clunk, thunk, and there went a cup of coffee spilling. “Sugar,” he cursed, still reflexively self-censored, like he still had a young child in the house, and Delia’s heart jumped up to bang against the back of her teeth.

Maybe that was the real reason her feet had brought her here tonight. It would be so easy. _Professor Oak, I need help_.

Delia had no memory of Samuel Oak returning to Pallet Town a single parent with a doctorate: she and Jason were the same age, so she had never known Samuel Oak as anything other than Professor Oak, father of one. One Jason Oak, her childhood partner in, as her mother used to say, _cahoots_. Her childhood had been set by the clock of Professor Oak riding up on his rickety three-speed to Pallet House every morning, Jason on the running board, to drop him off and get coffee before school started. Since Delia had come back, nothing had really changed, except now Professor Oak showed up without Jason balanced precariously without a helmet on the running board.

Being a single parent at her age had never stopped Samuel Oak from achieving any of his dreams. If he could do it, surely Delia could as well. And there was no reason not to benefit from his advice. Jason was at Celadon University now, so Professor Oak had to know what the right recipe for success was.

Across the kitchen, he tried to stand up too fast and banged the back of his head on the underside of the freezer door. “Ouch,” he said, rubbing furiously at the spot.

Now was the moment. Delia took a deep breath, squared her shoulders. _I’m pregnant_ , she practiced saying, thinking the thought as if she could force it out her mouth. _I’m pregnant, and I don’t know who the father is._ Nothing came out.

Oak turned back toward her, his eyebrows furrowed. “Delia? Are you all right?”

She laughed reflexively. “Yeah! Sorry, I guess I must have been more tired than I thought.” _Dammit._ His brow was still furrowed, a firm worried line.

“You really didn’t have to come all the way out here, although I can’t say I don’t appreciate it.” Finally done with the fridge, he came back over with a can of cola (this late?) and rescued his now-steaming quiche from the microwave. “If you hadn’t come by, I probably would have forgotten dinner.” He paused to chug half the cola, and then added, wearily, “Again.”

Delia sighed at him, exasperated. She had _expected_ her summer internship to somehow open her mind to the rigors of higher learning, but it had mostly turned out to open her mind to the wonders of Professor Samuel Oak, The Barely Functioning Human Being. How he had managed to raise Jason to adulthood was probably some kind of miracle.

“You need to get married,” she chided him, sticking with preferred Pallet Town Professor Oak perspective. He rubbed the back of his neck, laughing.

“If _you’re_ starting to pick up the party line, maybe I ought to consider it. Even Jason has been getting on my back about it.”

Delia could imagine it: when Jason wanted to, he had a way of rolling his eyes so that they froze at the top, as if beseeching some higher power, before finishing the revolution. She could see him doing that, gesturing at Oak’s half-empty fridge and disaster of a work/sleep schedule, and saying—

“‘Dad,’” Oak mimicked, between bites, “‘You need to get your shit together and convince someone to marry you. If I can’t be there to take care of you in your old age, you’ll starve the day you forget the phone number for pizza delivery.’” Oak shook his head, caught Delia’s eye. “I’m _thirty-seven_ ,” he despaired, loudly. “I’m not even _forty_.”

“It’s the hair,” Delia pointed out, not unkindly. He sighed again.

“I pray nightly that Jason inherited that.” He sat up again, went back to eating. “In lieu of convincing some poor woman I’m highly dateable material, I suppose I’ll have to keep hiring students.”

Half the time, Delia was exasperated by Professor Oak. The other half, she was fond of him, idiosyncrasies and all. He’d been the person who had welcomed her back to town, given her a job so she could have some income while she worked on reopening the restaurant, and came by every morning without fail to get his cup of coffee. Like clockwork, Samuel Oak would ride up at ten past six in the morning, bike clattering and brakes squealing, still bleary with his hair pressed flat on one side, buy his cup of coffee, and ride away, balancing with one hand on the handlebars and the other clutching his coffee.

She almost said it. Almost.

Instead, she said: “Actually, speaking of students, that’s the other reason I came by. I can’t find where I put Spencer’s phone number. Do you mind if I…?” Delia gestured toward the main part of the lab, where he kept his address and contact book.

“No, of course! Please, go right ahead.”

Delia went back to the living room, turned down the side hall that connected to the library and the Lab structure. The library door was closed, but the door to the Lab was open, light spilling out into the dark hallway. Delia stepped inside, squeezing past two precarious stacks of half-read conference papers that had washed up behind the door like flotsam. Out of habit she gathered and stacked the empty cups from around his computer, holding them in one hand while she pulled the address book off of the top of the desk with the other.

He never bothered to re-write contact information. Instead, Professor Oak just taped in whatever odd bit of detritus had been scribbled on and called it a day. Inside his address book there were sticky notes, bits of napkin, lined paper, pages from _other_ address books...which he had, to his credit, at least bothered to alphabetize.

Delia found Spencer’s phone number written on an orange sticky note that had been torn in half to fit onto the page next to his name. There was a stack of index cards that lived behind the computer, and she pulled one off of the top to copy the number onto. Delia tucked the number into her pocket, for safe-keeping, and patted it, once, to reassure herself that it was there. That done, address book replaced, she stopped to get the rest of the mugs before she left.

When she came back to the kitchen, the Professor was bent over the sink washing his plate. When Delia began stacking his old mugs next to him on the counter, he looked at her in surprise. “You really didn’t have to do that,” he said. “Thank you, but you didn’t.”

“I was in there anyway.” Delia started pouring out the old, cold coffee into the sink. “Just bring one back with you every time and they won’t pile up.”

He sighed, put-upon, and shook his head. “I wish the department would give me more funding so I could hire you full-time.”

“You don’t,” Delia corrected him, “Because I’d make you clean up.”

On the walk home, Delia stopped to let her eyes adjust to the darkness once the Lab had faded out of sight behind her, and watched as Pallet Town once more came into view, splayed out around the foot of the hill. It was nearly midnight so almost all the houses were dark, with porch lights and the odd bright bedroom the only human break to the darkness beneath the open, starless sky. Overhead a flock of Zubat flew by, calling to one another, their wingbeats bringing salt with them up off of Route 21.

Delia slid her hand into her pocket and clutched Spencer’s number.

In the dark and the quiet, broken only by the rustling of Rattata in the grass and her own heartbeat, Delia had a chance to think. She kicked a rock on ahead of her, looked up at the stars, and chose to think about nothing at all.

When she got to the base of the hill, she stopped under a streetlight and stood for a moment in the yellow circle of illumination as a Venomoth buzzed overhead, sitting atop the pole. If she turned and followed the road just north, around the side of the hill, she’d be home, and she could call Spencer there, talk in private in the ever-settling walls of her too-empty house.

In front of her sat the sole Pallet Town payphone, currently unused. Its fading green metal box had a much-stained clear awning and a bucket in lieu of a stool. Far away, she heard a few Pidgeotto cry back and forth to each other, warbling into the darkness. Delia hesitated, fingering the edge of the index card until it began to fray. She had no good reason to call him here, from an anonymous number, but—

Screw that. Delia pulled out her coinpurse and went to the phone, feeding in the fee before taking the receiver between her shoulder and her ear as she read the number off of the card, punched it into the keypad, and let it ring.

It rang through to an answering machine. “Hello, you’ve reached Spencer Hale’s answering machine. I’m currently working at the Ruins of Alph, and won’t be home until the thirtieth. If you leave a message, I’ll return your call when I get back. If your call is urgent, please dial the Pokémon Center at—“

Delia hung the phone up. She stared at her hand, holding the faded green plastic receiver into the cradle. Her heart was pounding in her ears, and she swallowed. “Why did I do that?” She whispered it, as if afraid someone other than the Venomoth was listening in. There was no immediate forthcoming answer, no clear, obvious reason why she hung up instead of leaving a message. It wasn’t like he was _there—_ she could have called again, waited for his answering machine, and left a message.

But she didn’t want to.

Spencer Hale was _nice_. But he also had a dream, and that dream was one that was going to send him all over the world, spending weeks at a time buried in research and the rest of them lost in ruins. He would never come live in Pallet Town, drink his morning coffee at the same time every day, repair the house when things broke and help her carry her gardening supplies home from the Nursery. In an emergency, Spencer was just as likely to be the one panicking than the one who could come to her rescue. If Delia married Spencer Hale, she would watch him disappear to conferences for weekends and never know half of what his research was on; he wouldn’t bother her with introducing her to his coworkers even though she had met him helping with Professor Oak’s research.

Any family life Spencer had was always going to be secondary to whatever his mind was waiting for, his body present while his head and his heart were en-route to their next destination.

Delia’s father had vanished from her life when she had been four, drawn by his own Pokémon adventure, and then never come home. She had lived that life once already, and Delia wasn’t about to uproot her entire world for a man who was _nice_ , just to have her child watch their father’s back disappear over the horizon. _Nice_ wasn’t worth her child growing up feeling as if they had lost something indelible, something they were supposed to have that had been ripped away. _Nice_ wasn’t worth her child growing up feeling like they were the second-place consolation prize instead of the Pokémon League Championship.

Maybe Spencer was the father—but what he didn’t know wasn’t going to hurt him, and Delia made up her mind then and there he was neither going to know, nor was it going to hurt him. Delia knew what _nice_ men were like. If she had called back, gotten the emergency number, and told Spencer, he would have come to Pallet Town, to marry her and help her raise her child. But even then, their lives would never be normal. She would bend herself over backwards, uproot herself and her child, to deal with their competing dreams.

Being nice meant nothing without being home.

Delia put the index card back in her pocket to put in her address book at home. She would call Spencer when he got back from his trip and see how his research was going, because he was her friend. _Just_ her friend. She walked the rest of the way home, and found her heart grew lighter with every step.

“Mine,” Delia said, smiling. She liked the ring of it, the way that it felt in her mouth. “My baby.” Her child. Not anybody else’s, not right now, maybe not ever. _Hers._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm pulling with wild abandon from anime, game, manga, and novel canons here, and preheating it to a temperature i like. this fic has two betas (jo+lillian), and is entirely the fault of jo's boyfriend matthew and pokemon the movie 2000's "professor oak loses his bike" sequence.
> 
> updates are aiming to be "weekly, approximately"


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first thing that Sam said when Delia opened her front door the following morning was: “I have an idea.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> from lillian, the suggested theme song for this chapter is "[one brick at a time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuY0rEe28A0)" from the musical barnum.

At 5:29 in the morning, Samuel Oak acceded to the clarion call of the Dodrio shrieking at the base of the hill that _there was at least one ray of sun which meant it was time to get up_ and fell out of bed. He lay facedown, tangled in his sheets, half-conscious. One minute passed.

His alarm clock went off.

Sam dressed in the dark, stumbled blearily downstairs and turned his computer on to start its daily boot sequence. He tripped out the front door in the midst of shoving his boots on, his keys clutched between his teeth and two Pokéballs crammed into the back pocket of his jeans. The picture of professionalism and grace.

At 6:10, his brakes squealing, he came to a clattering halt at the front door of The Pallet House restaurant, just as he had every single morning for the last sixteen years. Just like every other morning, the other early risers had already arrived for coffee or breakfast, farmers’ jaws cracking with their yawns, and morning shift workers still half-awake. The smell of bacon fat and grease and fresh-ground coffee filled the air.

Delia was manning the counter this morning, and when Sam opened the door, she smiled right at him. She had only been back in town for two months, but Sam had already forgotten how hard it had been to start his days without coming to The Pallet House. It wasn’t just that the coffee was better than anything he could ever have made at home—the routine of seeing someone he liked put a cheery spin on the rest of his day, no matter how bad it might be.

“You look pretty put together for only having half your shirt tucked in,” Delia said in lieu of _good morning_. Sam looked down, saw that half his polo was just hanging loose, and sighed. _That_ was the other reason he appreciated seeing her every morning—aside from his family, Delia Ketchum was just about the only person in Pallet Town who treated him normally. There was something about the _Professor_ that had set him apart, the first son of Pallet to go get a doctorate, and nobody ever remembered that he was still just Sammy Oak. People at home took him far more seriously than they ever did at the University

While Delia made his coffee, Sam counted out his change and put half into the tip jar, then leaned against the counter. “Are you closing tonight?”

“No.” She had to yell to be heard clearly over the espresso machine, the kitchen chaos, and the general hubbub.

“Do you think you might have time to come up to the Lab?” Sam quickly added, “Only if it won’t be a bother, it’s nothing pressing. I need to finish up getting things ready for the new Pokémon trainers next week, and I could use a hand.”

Delia smiled at him again as she slid his coffee across the counter. “Sure. What time?”

“Half-past seven?” He needed to remember to eat before she came over. Sam was already asking her for a favor, the last thing he needed was to ask her for her leftovers, too. That was just late enough that he’d have time to eat beforehand, and just early enough that he’d probably remember to.

“I’ll be there,” Delia promised, and Sam saluted her with his coffee cup.

Back at the Lab, Sam’s day settled into its unchanging routine. Coffee became breakfast, became picking which Pokémon were going to spend the day out in the pastures. Corral inspection and feeding the Pokémon took the morning, and by lunchtime he was so lost in pasture upkeep that he almost forgot to eat. His afternoon was email and syllabi prep, buried in the library for hours as he sorted through new and old literature, started compiling reading lists to copy when he went to the office next.

There was knocking at the door.

Sam blinked, halfway through reading over a thesis paper he had been editing. The clock at the bottom of his computer screen read 7:30 P.M. His stomach rumbled rebelliously.

There was another knock, and he almost jumped halfway out of his own skin, tripping over his chair in his haste to stand up. He caught his labcoat on his chair, got yanked backwards, scrambled to straighten it, and rushed to the front door, reflexively smoothing his hair flat as if that could make him feel more put together.

When he opened the front door, Delia was standing on the porch, one hand raised to knock a second time, the other balancing a cardboard coffee carrier with two cups of coffee. She had come dressed for farm work—practical jeans tucked into solid boots, a camisole and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Good evening,” she said, and Sam was too flustered to do much more than nod, mumble several appreciative syllables, and take the coffee.

“Should I take my boots off?” Delia asked, when he had stood there downing half the coffee without saying anything. He nodded instead of answering with words, then jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward the back of the lab, as if that explained anything. Delia seemed to catch on, and bent down to untie her boots.

She knew where to go, so he left to investigate his fridge and find something that he could pretend he had been eating for dinner. He had leftovers in a tupperware in the back and shoveled the remainder of Monday’s fried rice into his mouth before putting the container in the sink to wash.

As soon as he’d finished chewing, Sam followed her back, and found Delia had already glanced over the piles of papers he had shuffled around on his desk, picked out the ones that she had helped Spencer work on over the summer, and pulled those forward to be more easily accessible. In less than ten minutes, she’d already solved half his problems.

“Perfect,” he said, coming over to join her in sorting through them. Everything was there. “I’m going to go get the folding table out of storage, can you start putting together those information packets for parents?”

“How many parents do we have this year?”

“Eight, but I like to have doubles so people take home extras.” Delia nodded, and Sam left her to sorting the stacks out while he went to go find his folding table. It was in the storage room off of the library, but as usual some random stack of detritus had inevitably piled up and been stuck in front of it, so it took some looking. Once retrieved, Sam lugged it back to the office, carefully shifting it through the hallway to keep from banging it into anything.

The table went as close to the Pokéball sorting machine as he could wedge it without disturbing any particularly precarious piles. “Delia,” he began, turning around—and then stopped.

Delia was sitting backwards on his office chair, curled over the backrest. She was holding one of the pamphlets, this one titled POKÉMON AND YOUR CHILD. Sam wasn’t sure she’d noticed him at all. He tried again. “Delia?” She didn’t look up. The section she was on was the one about children who grew up without Pokémon in the home, and common first-time trainer problems that they might come to their parents with. “Delia?”

She finally looked up at him, took a deep breath as if steeling herself, and said: “Professor Oak, I’m pregnant.”

Whatever question he’d been about to say disappeared from his brain as soon as he’d come up with it. He blinked, twice. Took in a quick, deep breath, let it out. “How long have you known?”

“Since last night.”

There were so many other questions. So many things that he could say, that he felt like he _should_ say, like he had wanted to ask Agatha and hadn’t. The questions he _should_ have asked Agatha. But—this wasn’t his child. This was Delia’s child, Delia’s life.

The questions he wanted to ask weren’t the questions she probably needed asked. Instead, Sam let the tension out of his shoulders, relaxed his body language to be consciously open. “What can I do to help?

Delia hesitated, chewing the question over with a concerned look on her face. She leaned forward, folding in half over his chair. “I’m totally out of my depth. I need an adult. I’m an adult and I need an adult. I need an adultier adult.”

Sam instantly had the sinking, terrifying feeling in the pit of his stomach of _oh god, when did I become an adult, I’m not possibly an adult_ , and he had to clamp down on the instinct of saying as much to her. That she trusted him enough to tell him in the first place did not mean that Sam needed to destroy Delia’s idea of him as being a responsible person to ask complex questions. Or make her any more afraid.

After all, Sam had become a father at eighteen. And he liked to think that he’d not done a terrible job at it. Mostly.

“All right,” Sam said, with far more confidence than he actually felt in his theoretical adulthood, leaning back against the table, “Hit me with it.”

Delia took a deep breath. “Giovanni is the father.”

Sam held his breath and then let it out slowly, ran his fingers through his hair, and rubbed at the back of his neck. “Oh.” He had been ready for questions about how he had felt with Jason and Agatha, or how to be a single parent at a young age, but neither had been forthcoming. This was new. He definitely did not know anything about that. “If I ask something you don’t want to answer, you don’t have to,” Sam finally said, suddenly hesitant to overstep boundaries that he hadn’t realized Delia had. “Does he know?” Delia shook her head. “I’m assuming you don’t want him to find out.”

There was the trust inherent in admitting her pregnancy, and then there was the trust of revealing that whatever had happened in Viridian City had involved Team Rocket, because there was only _one_ Giovanni in Kanto who mattered.

Delia had only been back in Pallet Town two months, and Sam had already made a space in his life for her without even thinking about it. She had a quiet perseverance that he admired, an ability to tackle any problem put before her even if she didn’t have the first idea of where to start. It was a very sort of Pallet Town sensibility, a willingness to get down and put her hands into the dirt and figure it out as she went. Delia Ketchum was a very smart woman, and Sam valued her opinion.

He didn’t want to break her trust in him by sticking his foot in his mouth. Especially since Delia hadn’t come to him as Professor Samuel Oak, Ph.D., reasonable authority figure, but as Sam Oak, who had spent his three years at university juggling classes, a baby, a dying father, and his failing relationship with his girlfriend and her career. She had come to him as a friend. She _trusted_ him.

“Giovanni is never going anywhere near my baby.” There was an edge to Delia’s voice that made Sam think twice about crossing her, and he wasn’t even _involved._ He had wanted to put a hand on her shoulder in sympathy, but he had the feeling now that it would not help. “I don’t think he’ll come looking, but…I can’t risk it.”

“You’re certain it’s him?”

Delia shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter. If Giovanni thinks he’s the father, that will be enough.” Sam crossed his arms and frowned, thinking. “But you know what Pallet Town is like. Even if he isn’t looking for me, the news that Delia Ketchum, perfect town daughter, is _pregnant_? Everyone is going to tell everyone they can get to listen.”

“Yes,” Sam agreed drily. He did, indeed, know what Pallet Town was like. He had experienced _that_ firsthand. “Everyone and their mother will want to know who the father is, and there’s nothing Pallet Town likes better than a good mystery, as long as it isn’t about _them_.” Delia nodded mute agreement.

“Once the baby’s born it won’t matter.” She sat up again as she talked. Sam studied her face, watched her expression. Delia Ketchum had grown up quickly, just as he had. She had left to be on her own, and come back a very different woman, with secrets she had no interest in sharing. “Everyone will be too excited by a baby to care about where the baby came from.”

“So you need some way to deflect people, at least while you’re pregnant.” Sam rubbed his chin, still thinking. “I mean...I suppose you could go stay with a friend until the baby is born? Get out of town for a bit?”

“I thought about it,” Delia admitted. “But then that would raise even more questions, because I’ve only just come back and reopened The Pallet House. If I just leave immediately…It would seem like I was intentionally avoiding something. I was _thinking_ about going about my business as if nothing was wrong until I couldn’t hide it anymore, but I’ll have to go to Viridian for pre-natal checkups, and _that_ will raise questions, too.” There was a momentary crack, a lack of surety in her face. “I don’t even know what kind of checkups I should be having, and I’m _not_ seeing Dr. Gotoh.” Pallet Town only had one doctor, and he saw everyone for everything. Including Pokémon, if people weren’t close to the Lab.

If you wanted specialized care (or, for that matter, privacy) you had to go out of town for it. Most people went up to Viridian City, since it was closest and easiest, only an hour or so by car.

But going back to Viridian City would put Delia into a conundrum all its own.

“What do _you_ want,” Sam found himself saying, as gently as he could. “It’s all well and good to know what you _don’t_ want, but—“

Delia’s voice was nothing but firm conviction, and when she looked him in the eye it was with the kind of force that made him want to do whatever she asked. “I want my baby to have a home with people who love them, and I want that home to be _my_ home. I want them to be happy. And I want to be happy, too.”

“It sounds like you know exactly what you’re doing,” Sam said at last, and when Delia smiled it was infectious. “You’re miles ahead of where Agatha and I were when she found out she was pregnant.”

“Professor! That’s not exactly reassuring!” Delia’s voice was strained with something that Sam _hoped_ was laughter. “Now I’m wondering how you managed to get Jason to adulthood.”

“Sheer dumb luck and panic.” Sam softened, added, “And your mother. Amelia saved my ass constantly when Jason was little.” He swallowed to clear his throat. “I owe her a great deal. Anything that I can do to help you and pass on what she gave me…it’s the least I can do. If there’s anything I can offer, Delia, all you have to do is ask.”

“I...” It was quiet again but for the sounds of the few nighttime Pokémon left out in the corral, their own breathing, the clicking and beeping of all the Lab equipment. Down the hill, the clock at Town Hall distantly chimed nine. “Thank you,” Delia settled on.

Sam looked at his hands because that was easier. He hadn’t known what to say to Delia when Amelia was dying. He didn’t know what to tell her now. “I wish I had done more for her, at the end.”

“You did so much, Professor.” Delia sounded so sad, Sam almost wished he’d never brought it up. “I should have thanked you sooner.”

“I would do it all again in a heartbeat—and for you, too. Delia, _you_ are also my friend. Don’t forget that.” There was a loud sniff, and Sam looked up to find Delia wiping her face on her sleeve. He started searching his pockets for tissues or a handkerchief or _something_.

Abruptly, Delia began to laugh. “Knowing my mom, she probably didn’t have a clue what she was doing either! And you kept asking her for advice!” Sam choked slightly, still mid-search. She threw her hands up on the air and spun on his office chair. “I’m pregnant, and I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, but neither does anybody else!” Surprised, he also began to laugh. “Is it supposed to feel this way? Just like— _everything?_ ”

“Pretty much!” Delia laughed harder. “Let me see if I have some tissues around here, and then I really do have to finish getting everything ready for Monday...” Sam came over to his desk and started rooting around in the drawers, flipping through files, shoving aside stacks of binder clips, until he found the travel tissue pack he had been pretty sure he’d stuffed somewhere. He passed it to Delia, and then leaned against the desk next to her. “That said, I’ll think about your problem. I’m sure there must be a way to keep everyone from getting too nosy, and I’ll tell you if I can come up with any plans.”

Delia, mid-blowing her nose, nodded. “If I come up with anything, I’ll tell you, but I’ve not been able to think of anything that didn’t stink. I’m sure whatever you come up with will be a better idea than most of mine.” She wiped her eyes, and dropped the used tissue into the wastebasket. “Sorry, Professor Oak. I came over here to help you and instead you’ve been helping me.”

“Delia, just having you around is already plenty help. And, really,” Sam wagged his finger at her. “Enough with this Professor Oak nonsense; I should have stopped you ages ago. Please, just call me Sam.”

“All right,” Delia smiled back at him, warm enough that he couldn’t help but smile back at her. He’d helped put that smile back on her face, and he wouldn’t have hesitated to do it again. “Sam.”

All through the rest of the week, Sam went through the motions of his day distracted, his mind wandering back time and again to Delia’s conundrum.

On Monday he sent off Pallet Town’s newest set of trainers on their Pokémon journeys. On Tuesday and Wednesday he started the fall semester off by teaching lectures that rambled all over the place as he lost his train of thought mid-sentence and fumbled with his notes, further cementing his absent-minded professor reputation as he turned over some new angle of Delia’s situation. On Thursday he was so out of it at dinner with Jason and his girlfriend, Janine, that he didn’t even notice Janine was seven months pregnant until _after_ they had told him they’d eloped.

That night, he stayed up late, unable to sleep. He just laid in bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking. It was like a sore tooth that he couldn’t stop prodding—going in circles as he went over Delia’s worries about Giovanni finding her in Pallet Town, his worries about Jason, the niggling discomfort of being a grandfather before he even turned forty. He was happy for his son, happy that Jason and Janine we happy, happy about the baby, and yet—

When sleep came, it was uneasy, and even in his dreams he was still turning ideas over as his mind searched for a solution.

The first thing that Sam said when Delia opened her front door the following morning was: “I have an idea.”

She blinked at him. It wasn’t all that clear what was making her stare: the fact that Professor Oak was on her front porch at half-past eight on a Friday, or the fact that he probably had the somewhat-manic look of the man who had not slept all that much the night before.

“Okay?” Delia said, as Sam tripped hopping off his bike. He leaned it against her fence. “Do you want some coffee?”

“ _Please_.” He hoped that came out less desperate than it felt. Sam followed her in as she shut the door, bent down to take his boots off while Delia went in to the kitchen. “I’m not interrupting anything important, am I?”

“No, not at all. I’m going up to the Xanadu Nursery this afternoon, but not until after lunch.” As Sam followed her into the kitchen, he saw that she had already made a pot of coffee. She poured him a second cup to set at the open place at the end of the table. Now he looked more closely she was dressed for a day of gardening—a light summer blouse in a bright floral print, sensible jeans, her damp hair still drying and loosed from its usual ponytail.

“Do you mind if I pace?” He asked, still standing as she sat. “It helps me to think.”

“No, go right ahead.” Delia shrugged as she sat back down, and Sam nodded, picking up the coffee and cradling the warm mug as he began to pace the cramped length of the kitchen. “What’s your idea?”

“It’s a stupid idea,” he said, pre-empting himself. “It’s also not a very good one, but I think it will work. It might work too well, actually. Also I don’t know if you’ll like it?” Sam froze, mid-step, gulped down a mouthful of coffee. “Right, before I forget—Jason and Janine got married.”

“What?” Delia yelped, spitting a mouthful of coffee back into her own mug. “When?”

“They eloped a week ago, I just found out last night.” Delia was staring, and she looked just as surprised as he had felt, her mouth open in shock. “Janine’s seven months pregnant.”

“They _eloped_?” She repeated, and Sam nodded. She paused. “Janine’s _pregnant_?” And he nodded again, more enthusiastically, as Delia’s face broke into a grin. “I mean, that’s amazing! Sam, you’re going to be a grandfather—”

“I’m not even _forty_ I can’t be a _grandfather—_ ”

Delia’s mug clattered as she put it down, and before he could stop her Sam was fumbling his coffee to keep from spilling it as Delia got up and flung her arms around him in a hug. She was laughing. “Sam, you’re going to be a grandfather!”

“Yes!” He agreed, delighted because she’d called him _Sam_ , and then added, “Wait, no—that’s not a good thing, I’m not old enough to be a grandfather, and they already eloped so I can’t even tell them _not_ to elope!”

“Grandfather!” Delia replied, sing-song joy in her voice. Sam finally managed to set his coffee down, stilled Delia with one hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t you see? This is _exactly_ what I realized. Their plan worked perfectly. They shocked me so much with the eloping that I wasn’t surprised when they told me they were having a baby. One made the other less surprising.” Delia looked back at him, and he could see the connections starting to form.

“I suppose you have a point…” she began, and Sam cut her off.

“Delia, let’s elope.” Delia stared at him, her face passing through about five different emotions before landing on astonishment, momentarily too shocked to speak. “ _Fake_ elope,” he quickly clarified. “Think about it. Everyone will assume it’s a shotgun wedding. We spent all summer working together, the only obvious conclusion is that I was fooling around with my pretty young assistant and now I’m marrying you because of social responsibility.”

Delia sat down slowly, her face pensive as she rubbed her chin. “It would make sense...” she murmured. “Professor Oak having a shotgun wedding with Pallet Town’s favorite eligible daughter will be so shocking that nobody would ever think the baby could be anybody else’s. Why else would you be marrying me?” She sat bolt upright, gasped. “And Jason and I were in school together! The whole town will be so shocked that you slept with me, they won’t even think about Jason eloping and having a baby!”

“Yes! Precisely. The whole thing will be completely scandalizing—me, marrying you, stealing you from all the men your age, _and_ you’re pregnant, _and_ Jason and Janine are having a baby? I’ll be the worst influence in town.” He had never been a bad influence before. He’d always sort of wanted to be a bad influence.

“Sam, you don’t really think you’re a bad influence, do you?” Delia asked, and she sounded so hurt that he could even believe that—

“No. Of course not. I mean, I’m sure someone probably thinks that, but I don’t. Jason and Janine are so happy—” they’d both been glowing at dinner, and they had sounded ready. _Looked_ ready, felt totally secure with themselves and what they wanted. “I just wish they had told me sooner.” He ran his fingers through his hair, which probably only mussed it even more, sighed. “I’m upset that Jason thought I would ever be anything other than proud of him, but that says nothing about me being a bad influence. I just ought to tell Jason more often how happy he makes me.”

Delia sighed, looking at Sam with the softest, most indulgent expression. “You’re going to be such a good grandfather.”

He groaned. “Delia, please—“

“Sorry, I know! You’re not that old.” He gave her a hurt look, but it was hard to keep it up when she was grinning, so clearly delighted with herself. With _him_. “Anyway, your plan?”

Yes, the plan. Right. The plan. “I was thinking about what you said when it comes to babies in Pallet Town, and as soon as the baby is born, everyone will instantly forget whatever scandal came before. As soon as you and the baby are settled, we can get ‘divorced’ and blame it on our age difference. Everyone will say I told you so and go back to cooing over the baby. I’ll have an excuse to help you out however you need and nobody in town will question anything because they’ll all be too busy being furious with me.”

He stopped rambling as Delia frowned in frustration. “Oh, Sam, I don’t know...it’s not a terrible idea, but I hate how it puts you in such an awful light. You’re going to so much trouble to try to protect me, and if we do this...everyone would be so angry at you.”

Sam set his hand on her shoulder. “It’s not anything I haven’t dealt with before. Don’t forget, I’m still a hometown hero. It will blow over eventually. And you’ll be safe. That’s what really matters here.” She was still frowning, her expression clouded, and he hesitated before impulsively kneeling before her and taking her hands. “I’m lonely, Delia.” Sam couldn’t look her in the face as he said it. “I’m lonely, and I can’t bear to sit here and watch you go through what I did.”

“Sam...” Delia squeezed his hands.

“I won’t be earning any awards for it, but this was the best idea I could come up with.”

Finally, he looked up, and found Delia watching him with a thoughtful expression. She bit her lip, but didn’t pull her hands away. “So,” she began, “We pretend to get married, go about our business essentially as usual for nine months, and then we pretend to get divorced and go back to normal, as if nothing had happened?”

“Got it in one.”

Delia shrugged. “Well, it’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard. If neither one of us can come with anything better in a week, I’m game if you are.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> updates will be weekly for the foreseeable future. hold onto your panties.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They didn’t come up with anything better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the story, names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this chapter are absolutely not fictitious and their identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended and should be inferred. my landlord should shell out $2 more for a metal toilet flush handle instead of making me do fucking everything around here myself.

They didn’t come up with anything better.

In the end, Sam invited his brother John (who also happened to be the Mayor of Pallet Town) over to his house, and they sat him down and explained the situation. He thought it was a stupid plan, but he also couldn’t come up with anything better, so the following morning, Delia Ketchum and Samuel Oak went down to Town Hall and got “married.” By the end of the day, everyone and their second cousin knew about it. Eventually Delia got so completely fed up with people coming into The Pallet House and asking if the rumors were true—and then promptly demanding any and all gossip she’d be willing to share—that she closed early and went home.

At half-past nine that evening, Delia was roused from where she was sitting at the kitchen table, stitching a button back onto a shirt by the squeal of bike brakes outside followed by a knock on the door. When she got up to answer it, she found Professor Samuel Oak standing in front of her door looking more than a little chagrined. He had a duffel bag slung over one shoulder and a messenger bag over the other, still dressed from a day at work in much-faded and stained jeans.

His bike was locked to the column at the end of the porch, and there was something about that—the permanence of it—that made the entire situation feel so much more real. There was a moment, hesitant and odd, and Delia found herself, for the first time, taking stock of the fact that, for better or worse, they were now stuck with each other for at least the next nine months.

“Good evening, Delia.” Sam smiled at her. His smile was lopsided, his eyes softer at the edges than usual.

“You look tired, Sam.” Delia stepped aside, held the door open for him. “Why don’t you come in.”

It had been Sam’s brother who had pointed out that if they were eloping, they had better be prepared to live together. It was hardly a credible ruse otherwise, at least until it seemed like the marriage was falling apart. The thought hadn’t even crossed her mind before John had mentioned it—it wasn’t as if she had ever lived with Giovanni. In the two months Delia had been back in Pallet Town she had seen more of Samuel Oak than she had of Giovanni in the two full years they had been dating, their routines interconnecting in the mornings over coffee and in the evenings over leftovers, in shared rides to work and volunteer hours up at the Lab.

Her relationship with Giovanni had been, in comparison to the friendship she was building with Sam, painfully superficial. No human connection, just nights and weekends, sex and the morning after. They would spend a week in Viridian City and then he would vanish for months. Sometimes, Delia had gone with him, tagging along as just another member of Team Rocket, but they’d never spent _time_ together. She had never learned how he liked his coffee made, or what foods he liked, discovered any hobbies or interests beyond Team Rocket.

“I always lose track of time,” Sam admitted, interrupting her thoughts as he stopped to take his boots off. “I don’t know what time you usually go to bed, but I don’t want to come back here too late and make you wait up for me.”

“Actually, I was going to go get the key copied tomorrow, since I already have a key to the Lab.” Sam had given it to her over the summer, and told Delia to keep it if she wanted to keep coming by to help even after his student grant ran out.

Sam looked surprised. “If you’re sure...”

“If we leave at different times, you need to be able to lock up. Besides, I need the extra key.” Sam’s footsteps followed her into the kitchen, pausing in the doorframe. “I’m sorry about the state of the extra bedroom. I haven’t really...” Delia trailed off.

She looked down at the kitchen table, where her shirt was sitting, half-mended, at the same spot she’d eaten dinner her entire life. The seat to her right still had a place setting left at it, even though she’d been living alone since she came home. The decorations she’d not changed out around the house, even though many of them were old or in need of repair. Her mother’s bedroom, which sat quiet and dark except for when she shoved something in there to store it.

It had been nearly three years. When was she going to move on?

Sam set his hand on her shoulder, a warm, reassuring weight. “It’s all right, Delia. I really don’t mind.” She let out a slow breath, relaxed under the weight of his hand. He had a way of making it feel like _everything_ was going to be all right. Nothing ruffled Samuel Oak, and that was its own form of reassurance.

“Let me show you where everything is upstairs,” Delia pushed away the sudden wave of grief, turned around with a smile plastered to her face. Sam was looking at her carefully again, head just slightly tilted in thought, and Delia didn’t need to ask him to know what he was thinking. For a moment she thought he might push on it, ask her if she was all right, but then he let it go, stepped back, and followed her upstairs.

When her mother had been sick, Professor Oak had been a frequent houseguest, and he knew his way around well enough, but Delia still refreshed him on where things were.

The upstairs had low ceilings because of the gabled roof and consisted of the tiny hallway that dead-ended in the bathroom. On one side of the upstairs were the two bedrooms, and on the opposite was the room had, in another lifetime, been her mother’s library. To avoid spending too much time in there, because she still couldn’t bring herself to move things around, Delia had been using it to store her gardening materials.

When her mother had realized how little time she’d had left, Amelia had sat down and helped Delia sort her things with what she wanted to give away, so she didn’t have to on her own. Even still, the very fact that it wasn’t still full of Amelia Ketchum made it hurt almost as much as if it had been filled by her ghost. The absence was a presence all its own—and so Delia had avoided it, as if by not opening the door she wouldn’t have to grieve.

Sam turned on the light after she had opened the door and set his duffel down on the bed. Delia had come in and opened the window earlier, changed the sheets and aired the blankets out on the patio, so it was all more open and airy than it had been.

“Do you need anything?” Delia asked, as Sam rubbed the back of his neck and started pulling things out of his duffel. He shook his head.

“Mind if I take a shower?”  
  
“Go right ahead. Do you need shampoo…?” Sam flashed her a smile, the edges of his eyes crinkling.

“I brought some, but thank you.”

The background noise of water running in the bathroom, the scent of fresh steam, was surprisingly relaxing. Just not being alone all the time made the house feel lived-in, and Delia listened with half an ear to the sounds of cohabitation as she went back to fixing the button on her shirt. It was time for Mrs. Masae’s gossip show, and for once Delia actually got up and turned her radio on to listen. There was no better way to find out what was happening in Pallet Town than Mrs. Masae’s Gossip Hour, and Delia had a vested interest in finding out what new rumors were going to come out of tonight’s broadcast.

After the sponsor message and introduction, Mrs. Masae started with “I’ll cut straight to the chase, because if you’re anything like me all y’all’re interested in is whether or not Sammy Oak has been cradle snatching. After twenty years of avoiding holy matrimony, Sammy’s gone and robbed Pallet Town of our favorite proprietress, and I can only assume sometime next year we’ll be having a surprise addition to the Ketchum family. You’d think one illegitimate baby would be enough to teach our esteemed Pokémon Professor how to use protection!”

Delia sat there, grinning to herself in triumph, and listened to Mrs. Masae’s increasingly high-pitched gossipy ramble about shotgun weddings, eligible bachelors, and expecting the unexpected.

It was the little things in life.

Opening shift at The Pallet House meant Delia habitually set her alarm clock to go off at 5:00 A.M. on the dot, minutes before the Dodrio that lived at Color of Water farm started yelling its head off.

The following morning, four minutes before the alarm was meant to go off, Delia was awoken by a muffled snapping sound, immediately followed by Professor Samuel Oak, staid measurement of all things unruffled, yelling “Fuck!”

Delia was out of bed before she even realized she was awake, stumbling as her legs caught in her sheets. She pulled her bedroom door open and found the bathroom door at the end of the hallway partly ajar. “Sam?” She called, yawning, and the bathroom grunted affirmatively before Sam pulled the door open with his foot, revealing the scene of the crime.

His hair was entirely stood up on-end, his face puffy with sleep, and he was staring at the toilet tank warily as it refilled, seemingly afraid it might bite him. Delia shuffled in to join him, yawning again into the back of her hand (making _him_ yawn) as he closed the lid of the toilet and grabbed the porcelain cover on the tank and wiggled it free. Sam stared into the tank, and Delia edged in next to him to look at whatever was awaiting them. She was taller than Sam was, so she had a perfectly good view even for being further back, but it did not shed any light on that which her brain was too asleep to process.

The bar that connected the flush handle to the flap inside the tank had snapped off halfway. After years of use, the old plastic one had finally grown too brittle and warped to keep doing its job and given way with the distinctive finality that only something you really needed not broken could.

They both stared at it, still too groggy to really be able to make sense of what they were looking at.

Both of their alarms started going off. They were just exactly off-sync enough that when one didn’t beep, the other did. Sam and Delia continued to stare at the toilet.

“Why,” Delia said, at last, when she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“We’re cursed,” Sam replied, voice hoarse and gravelly with sleep. He needed to shave, greying brown stubble on his cheeks and chin making him look older than he was. “Has to be. Karma.” He looked at her balefully, eyes hollow and tired. “The universe is punishing us. For lying.”

Delia frowned. “That’s dumb.”

She’d been kind of thinking the same thing, though, so she wasn’t going to deny it. Steeling herself for freezing cold toilet water first thing in the morning, she reached into the tank and grabbed the broken lever out of the water, wincing. At least the chain hadn’t broken, so they could still use the toilet. “I’ll just...call a plumber.” She awkwardly balanced it over the hosing so it wasn’t completely submerged. “We can just...pull on the lever until it gets fixed.”

Sam groaned. “That’s silly.” He put the toilet lid down next to the sink and reached past her to feel around at where the lever bar had snapped off of the flush handle. “I’ll just fix it myself, it can’t be that hard.” Delia was pretty sure it could be that hard, actually. “I broke it, so if I can’t fix it, I’ll hire the plumber.” Their alarms were still going off, distant tonal squealing. Down at the end of the street the Dodrio started screaming.

“This is dumb,” Delia said again. It had about the same impact as commenting on the weather, but she wanted to say it anyway. Sam sighed. Delia sighed.

“This is dumb,” he agreed.

When Delia had been a child, her mother had constantly tried to impress on her the idea that a day starting out bad didn’t necessarily mean that she should write the entire day off. Delia had never really believed her.

When she got to The Pallet House, she was running ten minutes late, even with the ride that Sam had given her on his way up to the Lab. This morning she was sharing the shift with Dana. Dana had gone to school with Delia and Jason, and had gratefully taken back her old job when Delia had reopened. Today, she was pretending she hadn’t been watching Delia come riding up on the back of Sam’s bike.

Delia glared at her. It did nothing.

“Get caught up in something this morning?” Dana asked, innocently, as Delia unlocked the door. She ignored Dana. “It’s not like you to be running late.”

“The toilet flush broke.” Delia tried to make her voice neutral. Failed.

“ _Ooooh_ ,” Dana cooed, hugging Delia and thereby making it really difficult to finish unlocking the door. “Is that _all_? How are you gonna fix it?” Delia groaned, trying to escape the hug by shuffling in the front door. Dana came with her. “Are you going to call a plumber? Or is _Sammy_ going to—“

Delia groaned louder. Dana was laughing.

“If Sam _can’t_ fix it, yes, I’m calling a plumber!”

Of all the invasive, nosy questions that she could be asked, she would rather it be about her stupid broken toilet than anything else. The whole reason they were doing this was the unavoidable nosiness, but it didn’t change that Delia had _no interest_ in becoming the talk of the town.

It didn’t get better.

By lunchtime, the sheer deluge of nosy neighbors coming by to ask Perfectly Innocent And Legitimate Questions had worn down her last nerve, and Delia retreated to the kitchen where nobody could ask her any more stupid questions unless they yelled. It seemed that the entire population of Pallet Town, children and the usually-homebody elderly included, had turned out to bother her at work today. Even over the sound of her cooking, Delia could still pick up snatches of furtive conversation.

As she was cleaning up from the end of lunch rush, the front door burst open to Joey the paper boy. He froze, framed triumphantly by the open door, and then yelled out to approximately half the population of Pallet Town: “Mr. Garrison just tossed Professor Oak out of the hardware store!”

Delia, in the middle of washing a baking tray, dropped it into the sink. “Seriously!” She yelled—and for a moment, the Pallet House went very quiet.

Delia stormed over to the kitchen door and threw it open, pointed her sponge at Joey. “Joey, I want you to march back over there and tell Richard Garrison he isn’t welcome in my restaurant until he apologizes to Professor Oak.” She swung around, water dripping onto the floor as she brandished her sponge at her silent audience. “And the same goes for everyone else. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.”

They all stared at her, the silence abrupt and total. Delia stared back at them, meeting every pair of eyes that she could. Nobody spoke, which was plenty fine with her. She crossed her arms. The sponge continued to drip.

“Does anybody want to ask any burning questions?” Nobody had any burning questions. Nobody would meet her eyes, either, the quiet hush of embarrassment that had seized the room keeping her friends and neighbors from shoving their collective feet into their mouths.

But she had to sell this somehow. As much as Delia wanted to yell at all of them to go jump into Route 21, Sam was putting his own social standing on the line to protect her and her baby. They were in this together. She had to protect him, too.

Delia took a deep breath and dove into their lie. “So maybe we did elope! Given how much you all complain about either one of us being single, you’d think you’d all be happy, and yet I’ve not heard a single person say congratulations all day!”

Delia waited, and was rewarded with a contrite susurrus of congratulations from the restaurant. She nodded, satisfied, and slammed back into the kitchen. There were still plenty of pots to scrub, but Delia did it with a grin on her face and her heart racing about four-hundred miles an hour in her chest and a manic bubble of laughter about to burst from her throat.

Outside the kitchen, the restaurant broke into chaos.

At closing time, well after the last few usual haunts had cleared out to go home for dinner, the bell over the door rang as it opened. Still bent halfway into the fridge checking stock, Delia shouted “Go away! We’re closed.”

“It’s just me!” Sam called back, and Delia fumbled the carton of eggs she was holding, scrambling to catch it without cracking any. She shoved it back in the fridge and rushed to the kitchen door, opening it to find—

Professor Samuel Oak, sitting at the counter. He waved. “I just finished up at the lab, and since it was on the way, I thought I’d see if you needed a ride home.” Delia blinked Noctowlishly at him, and found that she was glad she’d already turned the lights out so he couldn’t see her blush. He gave her rides home _all the time_ , this wasn’t anything different.

“I’m not done closing yet,” Delia said, when she figured out how to put the words in order.

Sam shrugged, patted his messenger bag, and pulled out a stack of papers. “I can keep myself entertained. Take your time, Delia.” He gave her that lopsided smile again, the one that made his eyes all soft. Delia felt her heart flip over in her stomach with affection for him.

How anybody could think he was taking advantage of her, when really she was the one taking advantage of his kindness, was almost more than she could believe.

It didn’t take long to finish up with the last few things to do before closing, and Delia sung quietly to herself as she went through it all by muscle memory. When she finished in the kitchen, Delia dried her hands off on her work apron and bundled it into her bag to take home and toss in the laundry, and shut the door behind her. She found Sam waiting for her, his cheek resting on his fist, watching her with a drowsy, comfortable look. It was as if there was no place he wanted to be in the world at that moment but right there.

“Has anybody ever told you that you have a lovely singing voice?” Sam asked, finally opening his eyes again and starting to put his papers away as Delia turned out the last few lights.

Delia found herself grinning and shook her head as she went to the door. “Professor, I’ll have you know that you’re flirting with a married woman.”

“Delia!” Sam laughed, the raucous sound loud in the dark outside the front door. “For goodness’ sake!” She was laughing just as hard as he was, waiting for him to get his bike unlocked and upright before she climbed onto the back, sitting on the carrier rack, her heels balanced on the kickstand.

“Sorry! It just—you walked right into it.”

Sam paused, fidgeting with the bike’s headlight, trying to turn it on. It didn’t. He sighed. “I’ll...see if I can get a charge from a Pikachu tomorrow.” He looked over his shoulder toward her. “You’d better hold on properly, Delia. I don’t want to spill you.”

“Oh, sure.” She turned, shifting her weight off of the running board and onto the back of the bike seat behind him, Pallet Town’s only option for a bicycle built for two. “If you’re going to keep giving me rides home, you’ll need to buy helmets,” she told him as she wrapped her arms around his waist in lieu of anything else to hang onto. He started pedaling, his messenger bag bumping into her knee, the entire bike straining under both their weight.

“I have one somewhere,” he begrudgingly admitted, the sound of his voice resonating in his chest under where her ear was pressed to his shoulder. Delia held on tighter after they bounced on a pothole. Definitely needed helmets, and maybe to come in daylight and check where the holes were. Baby on board, after all.

“I heard that you got tossed out of the hardware store today.”

Sam sighed again, longer this time.

Delia sat up slightly, pulling her face out of where it was pressed into the back of his shoulder to look at the side of his face, lit in the yellow of the passing lights. “ _Really?_ ”

He shrugged.

Delia groaned, put her face back against his shoulder.

“Richard let me back in eventually. He was mostly upset about me needing to get your key copied. He was furious I hadn’t already had a key to your house.” Delia had expected that Mr. Garrison would be a cranky old bastard, but the reasoning didn’t make much sense to her. Then again, when had any bad-tempered old man needed an explanation to be a bad-tempered old man?

“He stopped being a jackass when I asked about getting the flush lever replacement, though,” Sam continued. “He was surprised when I asked for a proper metal one. Apparently most people just replace it with more plastic.”

“Why?”

“Beats me. I got it, though. I’ll fix it as soon as we get home.”

They went quiet then, listening to the sounds of Pallet Town halfway asleep and the creak of the bike under both their weights, the rattle of the wheels. Delia could feel Sam’s heartbeat and hear the distant howl of a far-off Growlithe. She almost fell asleep there, leaning against Sam’s broad back and listening to the even pace of his heart, warm and safe and knowing she’d get home early tonight. She had been so _tired_ lately, exhausted, and now she at least had an explanation for her constant fatigue.

Even still, when they got home Delia was slow in sliding off the back of the bike as Sam locked it up for the night. She was half asleep as she stepped inside and slapped the lights on.

“I’m exhausted,” Delia yawned, her jaw cracking as Sam followed her in. “I think I’m just gonna go to bed.”

“I’ll fix the toilet,” Sam replied, voice muffled as she climbed the stairs. “Don’t worry about it.”

Delia stopped at the top of the stairs and turned to look back down toward Professor Samuel Oak, all five-feet-five-inches of him. He was currently bent over awkwardly, the strap of his messenger bag hanging around the back of his neck, one sock-foot braced on the floorboards and one boot-foot still on the doormat as he tried to get the knots untied. The light at the top of the stairs caught on the brown that still threaded through his hair.

“Goodnight, Sam.”

He looked up and smiled. “Goodnight, Delia.”

At four in the morning, Delia woke up violently nauseous and proceeded to spend the first two hours of her day curled up on the floor of her bathroom with her head in the toilet. It was only then that she counted her lucky stars and thanked whatever ghost Pokémon that had seen fit to haunt her toilet tank, break the flush lever, and get Sam to replace it with a brand new metal one the night _before_ she got her first bout of morning sickness.

Maybe they weren’t actually cursed after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for a mountain that is literally incapable of riding a bike i sure did back myself into a corner with having romantic bike rides be a major theme of this fic solely because of the pokemon 2000 diglett scene. anyway, mamachari bikes are adorable, and i want one. i dont know what i'd do with it except think it was adorable, but i want one.


End file.
